Video Games Feed Your Brain Like Food

Video games are a nuanced art form and have been using food in complex ways almost since Higinbotham's Tennis for Two (a game that does not contain any literal food whatsoever, obviously, due to the fact its just few lines on a screen) wowed visitors to the Brookhaven National Laboratory.

It's tempting to list off how food is documented in games in terms of time or theme, covering examples of Pac-Man and his pellets, where players cannot progress to the next stage until the gluttonous yellow dude has devoured all before him (sort of like myself at a breakfast buffet, then), and moving onto the Mario Bros series (and Donkey Kong and Banjo-Kazooie [RIP] and Kirby and, really, the majority of the platforming genre), showing how they present a less abstract look at food and its relationship to us.

In video games, certain foods can produce specific benefits or harm, much in the same way that avocados will give you nice skin and eating the Styrofoam box that contains your kebab will not benefit you at all.

The sad reality is that mushrooms don't double our size as they do Mario's (I tried it and woke up at 6 AM on the N38 in Walthamstow) and the Italian guy who ate his 15 stray cats had not developed quadrupal grace and balance by the time he went to court. He would have if he were Kirby.

There's an argument to be made that Resident Evil flipped the traditional Pac-Man formula around, making the player the pellet, in an evolution from George Romero's Living Dead film series, which displayed humans as the commodity to be devoured. Now you could, quite literally, be the food.

Food in games has a slightly more storied history, one that goes beyond the physical and becomes almost conceptual. Food as games and games as food.

For the latter, consider the quite amazing world of product placement, with stuff like Kool-Aid having their own game to force you to buy the crap in real life, to the lovely touch of being able to feed tune to a stray cat in Shenmue for no other reason than you're a brilliant human being (which is a perfect moment to slip in this momentously charming bad dialogue video), to the rather breathtaking food blogs dedicated to recreating dishes in absolute detail, such as the Goron's speciality rock sirloin or the estus from Dark Souls.

Yeah, eating a spicy ramen in will increase your character's courage by a set number on a spread-sheet, and you can, if you want, play one of the numerous Cooking Mama games, which simulate the construction of food in all its glory without the laborious issue of having to eat any, but there's a deeper, neurological reason games and food are so connected, why games are food.

Take two of the most famous game series in the world as explanation. Metal Gear Solid is as much brilliant in its dark humour and philosophical scope as Snake, the C64-turned-mobile-based game that had us all developing RSI in the late 1990s. While the two games ostensibly share little beyond a shared name (Snake, in a variety of iterations, is the lead character of MGS), they are bound together by the concept of consumption, both within and without the experience.

In you control a line that moves on a plane defined by four borders whose sole mission in life is to eat dots that randomly appear on the plane. You already know this.

The snake grows precisely one dot each time this is achieved, providing the gamer with a clear sense of achievement with every attempt—look, my Snake is twice the size of yours—but also making it increasingly difficult to continue to grow without running into yourself and dying. This is a lovely metaphor for how eating too much will make you so fat that you won't be able to move one body part without coming into contact with another.

But the competition of the game is also feeding our brain via chemical reaction to feel satisfaction and the suggestion of finality, while secretly being about as beatable as Arsenal were during the 2003-4 Premier League season. I don't know anyone who has beaten it, but I do know tens of people who have used it as neuron-fuel to improve their cognitive ability, hand-eye-coordination and way-finding skills.

Last year a Russian, who claimed to have achieved the near impossible, uploaded a GIF that will break both your mind and your computer's running speed, revealing to at least 99 percent of people who ever played it, that the reward for eating every last dot is, erm, a screen that reads: "And now we'll show you a cartoon. Connection to server. No connection. Thanks. Everybody's free to go."

At first this may seem a bit cheeky. No cartoon, no connection. Just a slightly passive aggressive way of saying, "thanks, now bugger off", as if it's your fault the server is down and not because it was recycled into a toaster about a decade ago. But I'd wager that anyone who has ever completed a game like Snake would go right back to the beginning and start again, ignoring the game's admission that they're "free to go" because, by this point, Snake has reprogrammed their neurons to feed upon the bites of success, just as the snake feeds on the dots until it runs into its newly elongated body, which is a long-winded way of saying that this game is the perfect metaphor for the Ouroboros—the snake that eats itself.

The cyclicality of supposed gaming addiction, the just-one-more syndrome, isn't an isolated phenomenon—just ask anyone who plays foosball or enjoys chicken nuggets—and it is that topic of voracious consumption that Metal Gear Solid tackles.

MGS is an odd choice because only one game in the series actually contains literal food (excluding the rations). Having said that, consider the hunting sections in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater where, yes, Snake in MGS eats snakes, which is joyously coherent. Following from this—bear with—Naked Snake aka Big Boss, the original Snake, is cloned—causing the creation of three further Snakes who will attempt, at some point in the future, to replace their father. It's the simple concept of restarting the Nokia Snake game again and again, with different but the identical snakes.

There's a decent argument that Metal Gear Solid 2 was made by Kojima as a fuck-you to the consumerist culture that forced him to keep serving up the same dish again and again: instead of Snake, you have to play as Raiden, who is a bit of a dick and in no way as fulfilling. MGS2 is about as close to games have ever gotten (yet) to works such as Nabokov's Pale Fire, containing an ample amount of Fourth Wall Breakage and metafictional pondering.

How, the game asks, can you keep experiencing the same thing over and over and still be full?